Professor Miguel Quemada is appointed to the UE Nitrogen Expert Panel

“Nitrogen is essential for food and feed production, but when Nitrogen is use in excess losses to air and water have deleterious impacts on human health, water quality, biodiversity and climate change. We need to increase Nitrogen use efficiency at farm and regional scale. A better use of Nitrogen will enhance the recovery in all components of the agricultural, food and biomass chains, and will contribute to a more sustainable development”, says Miguel Quemada and adds “I am honored to be invited for this prestigious panel, and look forward to contributing to the work and hopefully successful achievements”.

There are various barriers and constraints to improving nitrogen use efficiency in practice, due to the tendency of academia, governments, industry and practitioners to work in isolation, and due to bureaucratic inertia. Some of these barriers can be overcome by bringing key experts from the different communities together and with dedicated leadership. Fertilizers Europe has therefore taken the initiative to set up an EU Nitrogen Expert Panel with selected key experts from science, governmental policy, industry and practice. Fertilizers Europe is an industry organisation, but the Panel is entirely independent.

The general objective of the EU Nitrogen Expert Panel is to generate new ideas, recommend effective proposals and solutions and to communicate a vision on how to improve the nitrogen use efficiency in the food chain in Europe. The first mandate of the panel is to define an easily understandable Nitrogen Use Efficiency (NUE) indicator, which can become an essential tool for assessing policy performance, and contribute to EU policy revisions like the Common Agricultural Policy and the Fertilizer Regulation.

The EU Nitrogen Expert Panel and its vision and aim was presented to the Global Partnership for Nutrient Management (GPNM), a multi-stakeholder initiative created by the United Nation, on 8 Dec 2014 in Washington, USA. The day after it was also presented to the European Parliament at the “Forum on Fertilizers and Nutrients for Growth”. At both events the constructive discussion which followed showed that the EU Nitrogen Expert Panel is at the forefront for setting up such monitoring tool.

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